Step 4

We read from the 12 & 12 today - Step Four.  It seems to me that the extended riff for the fourth  step can be summed up, more or less, by this phrase: "It's not them - it's you."  We only read three pages a week and these three were jam packed with good stuff.

There were a few paragraphs dedicated to the two personality extremes that we often see: The Depressive and The Power Driver.  They point out that both of these extremes suffer from a look-at-me egotism; the Depressive thinks he's a piece of shit and the Power Driver thinks everyone else is a piece of shit.  Both  of them are drawing attention to themselves.  There are some super-duper lines that have always caught my eye and made me wonder and laugh at the same time; such as this characterization of the Depressive: "We wallow in this messy boy, often getting a misshapen and painful pleasure out of it."

There were a few paragraphs that emphasize the lengths to which we go to make sure we blame anyone but ourselves for our problems.  One good defense is to say that all of our character defects are caused by drinking with the implication that all we had to do to release our inner saint was to cork up the bottle.  An even better justification is to say that it's the behavior of others that cause us to drink, the implication being that if everyone else just left us the fuck alone our inner saints would be flying all over the place.  And then the coup de grace: we could find an excuse to drink for any circumstances.  When things were good we celebrated and when they weren't we would drown our sorrows.  As you can see we were good at justifying our drinking.  It was never us.  It was always other people, places, and things. 

My take on this Step is that it's where I needed to start looking at me and I needed to start trying to be honest about it.  Most of us didn't fit neatly into either category and most of us were so loath to shine a light on our rotten interiors that we could only make a start at the kind of rigorous honesty needed to do a good Fourth Step.  Many of us have done more than one; we find that some of our more subtle defects start to burble to the surface and sometimes we're just not capable yet of even looking at the ones that are obvious to everyone else.